The Faces of Angels Read Online Free PDF

because of it, that first phrase stuck in my mind— It was a rower who found her. I closed my eyes and instead of Piazza Santo Spirito, where we were sitting, I saw the muddy green band of the Arno. And the boat. The oars rose and dipped and rose again, as the scull flew across the water, fast and smooth as a skate on ice.
    Sometimes, just after dawn, I go down to the bridges, so in all likelihood I’ve seen him, the man who found this girl. He’ll be thin and agile, a water-borne greyhound, and I imagine him, just as the sun is rising, glancing backwards, throwing a look over his shoulder and not realizing what she was at first, because by then she probably didn’t look much like a person any more. I imagine her putty white, mottled blue, her limbs heavy with death, already something less than human. Maybe he thought she was nothing but driftwood. Garbage that had been abandoned and left to rot in the neon green of the reed grass that grows below the ramparts of Ponte alle Grazie.
    And it must have been a shock, spotting her like that. Hardly what you’d expect on an early spring morning. So I think the rower should be forgiven if the first thing he wanted to tell himself was that she was just a drunk, passed out. That’s the natural reaction, to feel not fear, or even pity, but the pang of revulsion that sets the dead apart. I can’t blame him if the first thing he did when he saw her was reach for the belief that the girl lying there in the grass could not be in any way like him. That she could never be his daughter, or his wife or sister, but must instead be a vagrant. A junky. One of the lost. Nothing but a broken rider of dreams who’d crashed to earth in Florence.
    â€˜Can I see?’ I asked.
    Kirk shrugged and handed me the paper. The picture of the girl was small and grainy and stared up at me as he reached for his wine glass.
    â€˜How much do you want to bet,’ Kirk said, ‘that somebody’s picking them off? That it’s the population protecting itself, fighting back against the Scourge of Art Students.’
    â€˜Does it say she was an art student?’ asked Henry. Henry is a big bear-like creature of a man who refers to himself as ‘A-psychologist-from-Baltimore-who’s-on-sabbatical-maybe-permanently’. He has a beard and wears glasses and strange baggy trousers with oddly placed loops and pockets. It is not hard to imagine Henry as Baloo, the bear in The Jungle Book . Once, not long after we arrived, he entertained us all by drinking too much wine and singing, ‘Get Happy.’ Billy took a picture with one of the disposable cameras she loves and now it’s taped to the door of our tiny refrigerator.
    â€˜Nope,’ I replied. The paper didn’t say anything about who she was. It didn’t even give her a name, or age. The picture suggested ‘young’, and I held it up so the others could see. Henry grimaced, but Kirk ignored it.
    Like Billy and I, they share an apartment, and Kirk is Bagheera to Henry’s Baloo. The only thing that isn’t pantherish about him is his red hair. It’s long, and when he tucks it behind his ears, as he does frequently, he reminds me powerfully of my Second Grade teacher, Mrs Cartwright, who was memorable mainly for her carroty hair, and for the fact that she once fainted in assembly. Kirk, however, is not a Second Grade teacher. According to his ‘get to know you’ note on the signora’s website, he’s a lawyer from Manhattan, but from the way he works a crowd, even one as small as the three of us, you’d be forgiven for thinking he’s a stand-up comic. A sly smile snuck across his face.
    â€˜You know,’ he said, ‘the art students here. It’s probably like the body fighting viruses. Or trees developing resistance to Dutch elm disease. Or maybe it’s natural selection, the death of the weakest. The last into the Uffizi shall die.’
    Kirk